�Ӱɴ�ý

By Sophia Rockwell, University of Notre Dame, Class of 2025

As a senior at the University of Notre Dame, I reflect on the many opportunities I have had during my undergraduate education. It is rare for any student, let alone an undergraduate, to be able to pursue independent research, develop close faculty mentorship outside their field, and study internationally with field experts. Through the Nanovic Institute of European Studies, I have expanded my worldview, both in and beyond the classroom. Faculty and staff alike have taught me that to learn something fully, I must challenge myself and become immersed in history, culture, and people.

I study environmental science and global affairs, which may seem an untraditional combination at Notre Dame and within European studies. My first exposure to European studies came from a course taught by Dr. Abigail Lewis titled “Mobilizing Memory: The Politics of Memory in Modern Europe.” In this course, my classmates and I engaged with primary and scholarly material on how history and trauma shape European identities and cultures today. The course challenged my perceptions of history and how it impacts the modern world. Dr. Lewis’s course sparked an academic and personal interest in how public perceptions of history influence domestic and political conduct, as well as an enduring interest in modern European history. 

I was thrilled to hear about the first session of the “Lublin: Site and Symbol of Jewish Presence” summer program. Unlike a traditional undergraduate study abroad program, the Nanovic Lublin Program highlighted the collaboration and cross-cultural exchange between American Catholic and Polish Catholic universities through religion, politics, art, literature, architecture, history, and museum curation. Four students from the University of Notre Dame traveled with our advisors, Dr. Lewis and Rev. James Lies, C.S.C., to Lublin, Poland, to learn alongside students from John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL). Our advisors and those from KUL (Professor Magda Charzyńska-Wójcik, Professor Paul Miller-Melamed, and Professor Patrycja Antoszek), developed a fourteen-day program focused on the study, reckoning, and celebration of Jewish identities throughout the complicated history of Lublin. 

Lublin is a vibrant city, dynamically shaped by history. For centuries, Lublin was a hub of Jewish life, manifested through art, food, music, architecture, education, and religious celebrations. During the German occupation, starting in 1939, Lublin became a site of atrocity. In 1941, the Germans established a ghetto in Lublin, where the Jewish quarter had once stood. By 1942, to death and concentration camps across Europe. The genocide of the Lublin Jews and the destruction of the Jewish quarter of the city all but erased the physical and cultural imprint of Jewish culture in Lublin until today. 

Lublin is currently undergoing efforts to honor, remember, and pay tribute to the Jews who formed the city and were the victims of such evil. Jewish culture and history are deeply interwoven in the fabric of Lublin’s identity. While living in Lublin, the purpose of our study was to pay homage to these people and reckon with the attempted erasure of Jewish identity, culture, and history from the city. This program was even more impactful because of the participation of our KUL peers. For them, the program’s topic was not merely international history, but rather a part of their personal and family stories. During our visits to important sites in Lublin, our Polish peers shared how these sites have figured in their personal and family histories. 

Each day of our trip highlighted unique aspects of Jewish identity, culture, and history in Lublin before, during, and after the Holocaust. We read and discussed Polish Jewish literature, including Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel The Magician of Lublin. We learned about the impact of Jewish composers on Polish classical music by attending public concerts and speaking with KUL professors. We attended film and theater performances highlighting the lives of Polish Jews. We engaged with historical sites of Jewish importance throughout the city both present and no longer present. Many of these sites were demolished and later built to be commercial centers, a poignant example of the physical erasure of Jewish presence within the city. We also toured the remaining Jewish spaces, including Jewish cemeteries, the Brama Grodzka Gate, and the Yeshiva, which are now nestled within the modern framework of Lublin. The architectural imprints of the Jewish community within Lublin create a jarring contrast between a historical Lublin rich in Jewish culture and a modern Lublin built upon the wreckage of the Jewish quarter’s erasure. The city’s reckoning with its history was the topic of many conversations for us, prompting eye-opening and vulnerable discussions on how it directly impacts our Lublin peers and families.

Alongside learning about Jewish identity within Lublin, the program participants visited sites outside its limits. Only three miles outside of the city lies Majdanek, one of the largest extermination camps and . The location of this site of horror near Lublin highlights the stark proximity of such atrocities to a city once bustling with Jewish life. In contrast to Majdanek, where the architecture remains largely untouched from when it was in use, we also toured Sobibór, a Nazi extermination camp sixty miles east of Lublin. Sobibór, known for the prisoners who led a successful revolt and escape, was destroyed by German officers in 1943. What remains today is the footprint of the buildings that once stood there and a , opened in 2020, about the history of the camp and the prisoners who were murdered there. We visited Warsaw and toured the Old City, the POLIN museum, and the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. We also toured two Jewish cities outside of Lublin, Włodawa and Kazimierz Dolny, to gain a deeper perspective on Jewish cultural life and loss within Poland. By visiting these cities, we experienced the power of remembering the history of Jewish life and culture, as well as persecution in Poland. 

The program faculty’s dedication to immersing us in the culture, scholarship, and history of Lublin and the Polish Jewish identity enriched our experience in Poland. Local experts challenged us to deeply engage with the stories and topics we explored. Our classrooms extended into the vibrant city streets, allowing us to be immersed each day in Lublin’s past and present. The program balanced learning about the horrors and hardship of the Jewish experience in Lublin with the joyous celebrations of life and culture that generations of Lublin Jews held before the Nazi occupation. The Polish Jewish experience, unlike what I learned in American academic courses, was not defined only by the Holocaust. Rather, today the Polish Jewish experience is upheld through community efforts to uplift celebrations of Jewish culture—through museum exhibits honoring the residents of the Lublin Ghetto in Brama Grodzka, concerts in the park of Polish Jewish composers, and organizations that focus on rebuilding and remembering the Jewish identity in Lublin. Our program celebrated the resiliency, authenticity, and multi-faceted manifestations of the Jewish presence within Lublin, facilitating a holistic immersion into the people and culture that form the city.

The city of Lublin was transformed into an experiential classroom due to the collaborative nature of the Nanovic/KUL summer program. Throughout the two-week program, the course participants and facilitators became a family, attending lectures during the day, exploring the markets and cafes during breaks, and sharing stories from our different corners of the world at night. With open arms and kind hearts, the Lublin cohort welcomed and instantly made the Nanovic students feel at home through their compassion and generosity. While understanding Polish was not a pre-requisite of the course, our KUL peers exhibited patience — and slight amusement — in teaching us the basics of conversational Polish. They gave us tours of the city and university campus they call home, and they shared their ways of life. These small informal learning experiences helped us understand the nuances of life in Lublin through the eyes of our generation.

The impact of the Lublin program would have been drastically different without the cross-cultural exchange that we engaged in with our Polish peers. Compared to traditional study abroad programs that involve “transplanting” American students to Europe, our cohort developed authentic relationships with our Polish peers that promoted learning outside of the structured academic program. I am hopeful that these relationships lay the foundation for further collaboration in which American universities can reciprocate and host their European student collaborators for continued intercultural communication. Notre Dame and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies are uniquely positioned to spearhead such international and experiential initiatives. This program showed me that the best way to spark a compassionate and holistic investment in European affairs is by eliminating the geographic barriers that separate students from meeting, talking, and learning from each other. 

As an American student with little exposure to Europe, let alone a historical emphasis on Eastern Poland, participating in the first cohort of the Lublin summer program is an opportunity I will cherish forever. By making the world seem a bit smaller and more attainable to explore, I not only have grown as a student but as a global citizen engaged in dialogue surrounding our world’s most pressing issues. It is my hope that more students leap out of their comfort zones to embrace international experiential learning opportunities in Europe as a part of their undergraduate academic journeys. I am extremely thankful that the Nanovic Institute continues to invest in the academic, personal, and experiential growth of Notre Dame undergraduate students. I am thrilled for the future students who will undoubtedly find their spark within European studies. 

---

Author Bio

Sophia Rockwell ’25 is majoring in Environmental Science and Global Affairs. At Notre Dame, she is a leader of the Kellogg Developing Researchers Programs, a program assistant at the Gender Relations Center, and a student manager of the Notre Dame Men’s Lacrosse team. Within the Nanovic Institute, Sophia has worked on the Sites of Memory in Contemporary Europe project in Heidelberg and Dachau, Germany, received funding to work at the Third International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding in The Hague, Netherlands, and participated in Nanovic’s inaugural “Lublin: Site and Symbol of Jewish Presence” program in Lublin, Poland.